Digitales2003 is calling for stories and texts about gender and technology. Different stories:

One often hears that girls are not interested in technical things because they are too cold and too systematic, but what about telling them that one of the pioneers of computing wanted to create a machine that would enable him to contact his lost loved one and that he died like Snow White after eating a poisoned apple : isn’t that a beautiful fairy tale?

That’s certainly a different way of telling Turing’s story. Do any of you know more about the lost loved one and how he hoped to contact him through his machines? (via Hilde)

4 thoughts on “different stories

  1. Liz

    Well, Cryptonomicon tells a tale along those lines, but I didn’t know how much of it was Stephenson’s literary license, and how much was fact.

  2. Norman

    When Anne Moir, a biologist, told one of her friends she was preparing “Brainsex”, a book for non specialists that summarises the enormous amount of readily available evidence which helps explain how and why male and female brains are different, she was cautioned against the dangers of writing such a book.
    Since no one seems to read it, her friend’s fears proved overstated. Sadly, this obvious starting point for understanding WHY there may be differences between the sexes is “out of bounds”. The current fad is to insist on pretending nature plays no significant role, and then try to assign everything to nurture.
    Once the zeitgeist assigned everything to nature, which was just as absurd; but then they had the excuse of the evidence not being as clear and convincing as it was by Moir & Jessel’s time.

  3. Jesper Juul

    I think that the thing about contacting a lost one via machines is entirely made up.
    I recently read Martin Davis: “The Universal Computer” (2000) which describes the history of the computer as mathematical development from Leibniz, Boole, Frege, Cantor, Hilbert, Gˆdel, to Turing. Aa Davis describes it, the Turing machine is a theoretical construct used to prove that you cannot make an algorithm for solving the entscheidungsproblem (whether a given proposition can be proven according from a set of premises – if I understand it correctly :).
    The Turing reference is “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (1936).

    There appears to be no reference to communication anywhere in this – is it really doing anybody any good to make up these things? Imagine the disappointment of someone (regardless of sex) who like fairy tales but dislikes math & logic when they get to look at what computer science is actually like.
    Or imagine the people who like math & logic but dislikes fairy tales who are turned away from computer science due to a misleading story like this one…

  4. join-the-dots

    digitales 2003

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

Triple book talk: Watch James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me discuss our 2023 books

Thanks to everyone who came to the triple book talk of three recent books on machine vision by James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me, and thanks for excellent questions. Several people have emailed to asked if we recorded it, and yes we did! Here you go! James and Jussi’s books […]

Image on a black background of a human hand holding a graphic showing the word AI with a blue circuit board pattern inside surrounded by blurred blue and yellow dots and a concentric circular blue design.
AI and algorithmic culture Machine Vision

Four visual registers for imaginaries of machine vision

I’m thrilled to announce another publication from our European Research Council (ERC)-funded research project on Machine Vision: Gabriele de Setaand Anya Shchetvina‘s paper analysing how Chinese AI companies visually present machine vision technologies. They find that the Chinese machine vision imaginary is global, blue and competitive.  De Seta, Gabriele, and Anya Shchetvina. “Imagining Machine […]

Do people flock to talks about ChatGPT because they are scared?

Whenever I give talks about ChatGPT and LLMs, whether to ninth graders, businesses or journalists, I meet people who are hungry for information, who really want to understand this new technology. I’ve interpreted this as interest and a need to understand – but yesterday, Eirik Solheim said that every time […]